by Marlon James
“No embrace for the man who saved your life more times than a fly blinks?”
“Does the fly blink?”
He laughed again and jumped from his stool. I took his hands, but he pulled away and grabbed me, pulling in tight. I was ready to say this feels like something from boy lovers in the east until I felt myself go soft in his arms, weak, so weak I barely hugged back. I felt like crying, like a boy, and I nodded the feeling out of me. I pulled away first.
“You have changed, Leopard,” I said.
“Since I sat down?”
“Since I saw you last.”
“Ay, Tracker, wicked times have left their mark. Are your days not wicked?”
“My days are fattening.”
He laughed. “But look at you, talking to the cat of change.” His mouth was quivering, as if he would say more.
“What?” I asked.
He pointed. “Your eye, you fool. What kind of enchantment is that? Will you not speak of it?”
“I have forgotten,” I said.
“You have forgotten there is a jackal’s eye in your face.”
“Wolf.”
He moved in closer and I smelled beer. Now I was looking at him as deep as he was looking at me.
“I am already waiting for the day you finally tell this one to me—lusting for it, I am. Or dreading it.”
I missed that laugh.
“Now, Tracker. I found no boys for sport in your city. How do you make do with night hunger?”
“I quench my thirst instead,” I said, and he laughed.
It was true that in those years I lived as monks do. Other than when travels took me far and there were comely boys, or not as comely eunuchs, who though not pretty were more skilled in love play. And even women would sometimes do.
“What have you been doing the last few years, Tracker?”
“Too much and too little,” I said.
“Tell me.”
These are the stories I told the Leopard as I drank wine and he drank masuku beer at Kulikulo Inn.
* * *
—
One year I lived in Malakal, before I moved to Kalindar, the disputed kingdom at the border with the South. Home of great horse lords. Truly, the place was more a set of stables with lodging for men to fuck, sleep, and conspire. No matter which side you came from, the city could only be reached by hard land journey. War-loving people, bitter and vengeful in hate, passionate and vigorous in love, who despised the gods and challenged them often. So of course I made it home.
So in Kalindar was a Prince with no princedom, who said his daughter was kidnapped by bandits on the trail north. This is what they wanted in ransom: silver, the weight of ten and seven horses. Hear this, the Prince sent his servant to get me, which he tried to, in a way keeping with the Prince’s foul manners. I sent him back missing two fingers.
The Prince’s second servant bowed and asked me to please the Prince with my appearance. So I went to his palace, which was just five rooms, each stacked on the other, in a courtyard overrun with chickens. But he had gold. He wore it on his teeth and stringed it through his eyebrows and when the privy boy passed by, he carried a shit pot of pure gold.
“You, the man who took my guard’s fingers, I have use for you,” he said.
“I cannot find a kingdom you have not lost,” I said. The Kalindar have no double tongue, so the remark went right back out to sea.
“Kingdom? I don’t need kingdom finding. Bandits kidnapped my daughter, your Princess, five days ago. They have demanded a ransom, silver the weight of ten and seven horses.”
“Will you pay it?”
The Prince rubbed his bottom lip, still looking in the mirror.
“First I need trustful word that your Princess is still alive. It has been said that you have a nose.”
“Indeed. You wish that I find her and bring her back?”
“Listen to the way he speaks to princes! No. I only wish you find her and give me good report. Then I shall decide.”
He nodded to an old woman, who threw a doll at me. I picked it up and smelled her.
“The price is seven times ten gold pieces,” I said.
“The price is I spare your life for your insolence,” he said.
This Prince with no princedom was as frightening as a baby crying over shitting itself, but I went searching for the Princess, because sometimes, the work is its own pay. Especially when her scent took me not to the north roads, or the bandit towns, or even a shallow grave in the ground, but less than a morning’s walk from her father’s little palace. In a hut near a place that used to be a busy market for fruit and meat, but is now wild bush. I found her at night. She and her woman-snatchers, one of whom was reeling from a slap to the side of his head.
“Ten and seven horses? Is that all I am to you, ten and seven? And in silver? Was your birth so low that you think this is what I am worth?”
She cussed and snarled for so long that it began to bore me, and still she cussed. I could tell the kidnapper was coming to think mayhaps he should pay the Prince to take her back. I smelled the shape-shifter’s gift on him, a cat like the Leopard. A Lion, perhaps, and the other men lying about were his pride and the woman by the fire looking at them both with a scowl was his mate until this princess. All of them squeezed into a room with the Princess yapping like cockatoo. This was the plan: that the Lion and his pride kidnap the Princess and demand a sum. A sum which her father would gladly pay because his daughter is worth more than silver and gold. The ransom, the Princess would use to pay mercenaries to overthrow this Prince, who had no princedom to overthrow. At first I thought she was like those boys and girls kidnapped too young, who in the midst of captivity start to show loyalty to their captors, even love. But then she said, “I should have picked Leopards; at least they have cunning.” The head Lion man roared so loud it frightened people in the street.
“I think I know how this story ends,” the Leopard said. “Or maybe I just know you. You told the Prince his daughter’s plot, then slipped away as quiet as you came.”
“Good Leopard, what would be the fun in that? Besides, my days were long and business slow.”
“You were bored.”
“Like a god waiting for man to surprise him.”
He grinned.
“I went back to the Prince and gave good report. I said, Good Prince, I have yet to find the bandits, but on my way, I did pass by a house near the old market, where men were conspiring to take your crown.”
“What? Are you sure of it? Which men?” he asked.
“I did not look. Instead I hurried back to you. Now I will go find your daughter,” I said.
“What should I do with these men?”
“Have men sneak up to the house like thieves in the night and burn it to the ground.”
The Leopard stared at me, ready to pull the story out of my mouth.
“Did he?”
“Who knows? But next moon I saw the daughter at her window, her head a black stump. Then I cursed Kalindar and moved back to Malakal.”
“That is your story? Tell me another.”
“No. You tell me of your travels. What does a Leopard do in new lands where he cannot hunt?”
“A Leopard finds flesh wherever he can find it. And then there is flesh he eats! But you know how I am. Beasts like us were never made for one place. But nobody traveled as far as I. Boarded a ship I did, eager I was. I went to sea, then boarded another ship and it went farther out to sea for moons and moons.”
He climbed up in the chair and stooped on the seat. I knew he would.
“I saw great sea beasts, including one that looked like a fish but could swallow an entire ship. I found my father.”
“Leopard! But you thought he was dead.”
“So did he! The man was a blacksmith living on an island in the midd
le of a sea. I forget the name.”
“No you did not.”
“Fuck the gods, maybe I don’t want to remember. He was no longer a blacksmith, just an old man waiting to die. I stayed there with him. Saw him forget to remember, then saw him forget that he forgets. Listen, there was no Leopard in him—he had forgotten it all living with his young wife and family under one roof, which is no Leopard’s nature. Curse you and your whiskers, he said to me many times. But some days he would look at me and growl and you should see how startled he was, wondering where the growl came from. I changed in front of him once and he screamed as an old man screams, making no sound. Nobody believed him when he shouted, Look a wildcat, he will eat me!”
“This is a very sad story.”
“It gets sadder yet. His children in that house, my brothers and sisters, all had some trace of the cat in them. The youngest had spots all over his back. And none of them liked to wear clothes, even though on this island in the river, men and women covered everything but eyes. When he was dying he kept shifting from man to Leopard to man on his death mat. It scared the children and grieved the mother. In the end it was only me, my youngest brother, and him in the room, since everybody else but the youngest thought it was witchcraft. The youngest looked at his father and finally saw himself. We both became Leopards and I licked my father’s face to calm him. In endless sleep, I left him.”
“That is a sad story. Yet there is beauty in it.”
“You a lover of beauty now?”
“If you saw who left my bed just this morning, you would not ask that question.”
I missed his laugh. The entire inn heard when the Leopard laughed.
“A wanderer I became, Tracker. How I moved from land to land, kingdom to kingdom. Kingdoms where people’s skin was paler than sand, and every seven days they ate their own god. I have been a farmer, an assassin, I even took a name, Kwesi.”
“What does it mean?”
“Fuck the gods if I know. I even became an entertainer of the bawdy arts.”
“What?”
“Enough, man. The reason I sought you out—”
“Fuck the gods with your reason, I will hear more of these bawdy arts.”
“We don’t have much time, Tracker.”
“Then be quick about it. But spare no detail.”
“Tracker.”
“Or I shall rise and leave you with the bill, Kwesi.”
He almost winced when I said that.
“Fine. Enough. So I was a soldier.”
“This doesn’t begin like a bawdy story.”
“Fuck the gods, Tracker. Maybe the story begins when a man found an army—”
“North or South?”
“Fucks for both. I say, this man found an army with need for a man with superior archery skills. This man found himself in lands with no food, and no amusement. This man might have been great with killing the enemy, but was not great keeping peace between his fellow soldiers. Though one or two comely ones served their use.”
“Ever the Leopard.”
“This is how it came to pass. We attacked a village that had no weapons besides stones to cut meat, and burned down their huts with women and children still in them. It happened this way. I said, I do not kill women and children, not even when hungry. The commander’s little bitch says, Then kill them with your bow. I say these are not fighters in war and he says you have an order. I walk away because I’m no soldier and this was not a fight worth coin.
“Say this also happened. The little bitch screamed traitor and in the quick his men were upon me; meanwhile soldiers were still setting fire to children trapped in huts. Four soldiers came at me, and I fired four arrows between four sets of eyes. The little bitch tried to scream again but my fifth arrow went right through his throat. So it goes without telling you, Tracker, that I had to leave, under the cover of fire smoke. But then I wandered for days and days before I found that I was in the sand sea where nothing lives. Four days without water or food, I started to see a fat woman walking on clouds and lions walking on two legs, and a caravan that never touched the sand. Men from the caravan picked me up and threw me in the back.
“I woke up when a boy’s mother had him throw water in my face. The caravan dumped me at some doorstep in Wakadishu.”
“From the sand sea to Wakadishu takes moons, Leopard.”
“’Twas a fast caravan.”
“So now you’re a mercenary,” I said.
“Look at this leper accusing another leper of leprosy.”
“But I find men, not kill them.”
“Of course. It’s cow’s blood you’re always wiping from your helmet. Why do we war over words? Are you happy, Tracker?”
“I am content with much. This world never gives me anything, and yet I have everything I want.”
“Fool, not what I asked you.”
“Beasts look for happiness now? Be less the man and more the Leopard, if this is the man you are going to be.”
“Fuck the gods, Tracker, ’tis a simple question. The longest answer is but one word.”
“This affects your offer?”
“No.”
“Then there’s your answer. I am busy and better busy than bored, is that not so?”
“I’m waiting—”
“For what?”
“For you to say that sadness is not the absence of happiness, but the opposite of it.”
“Have I ever said that?”
“You say something close. And who does your heart belong to?”
“You told me once nobody loves no one.”
“I may have been young, and in love with my own cock.”
“Jakrari mada kairiwoni yoloba mada.”
“What use is that tongue to a cat?”
“Your cock is like a camel to you.”
I was starting to tell him things just to hear that cat laugh.
“I don’t trust people who take voyages without return; it gives them no stakes. I’ve been, let’s say, disappointed by men with nothing to lose,” he said.
“Are you happy?” I asked.
“You answer a question with a question?”
“Because here we are, whining like first wives of husbands who no longer want us. But then I’m a boy raised by no one and you pretend to be a man when it suits you, but there are many enchanted beasts that can talk. Whatever this offer is of yours, I’m liking it less and less.”
“My offer hasn’t left my lips, Tracker.”
“No, but you are doing some kind of test.”
“Forgive me, Tracker, but I have not seen you in moons upon moons.”
“And you are the one who sought me out, cat. And now you waste my time. Here’s coin for the raw boar. And extra for all the blood they left in for you.”
“It does me good to see you.”
“I was about to say the same, then you started wondering about my heart.”
“Oh brother, your heart I wonder about all the time. Worry too.”
“This too is part of it.”
“What?”
“Your fucking test.”
“Tracker, we are freeborn. I am drinking and eating with another. At least sit if you’re never going to eat.”
I got up to leave. I was a good few paces away from him when I said, “Send word for me when I have passed whatever test it was you were trying to give me.”
“You think you passed?”
“I passed when I came through the door. Or you wouldn’t have waited four days to call on me. You ever see a man who doesn’t know he’s unhappy, Leopard? Look for it in the scars on his woman’s face. Or in the excellence of his woodcraft and iron making, or in the masks he makes to wear himself because he forbids the world to see his own face. I am not happy, Leopard. But I am not unhappy that I know.”
; “I have word of the children.”
He knew that would stop me.
“What? How?”
“I still trade with the Gangatom, Tracker.”
“Give me this word. Now.”
“Not yet. Trust me, your girl is fine, even if she still huffs and puffs and turns to blue smoke when she loses her temper, which is often. Have you seen them?”
“No, not ever.”
“Oh.”
“What is this oh?”
“A strange look on your face.”
“I have no strange look.”
“Tracker, you are nothing but strange looks. Nothing is ever hidden from your face, no matter how much you try to mask it. It’s how I can judge where your heart is with people. You are the world’s worst liar and the only face I trust.”
“I will hear of the children.”
“Of course. They—”
“Did none say I came to see them? Not one?”
“You just said you have not seen them. Not ever, this is what you said.”
“Not ever it might as well be, if they say they have not seen my face.”
“More strangeness, Tracker. The children are fat and smiling. The albino will soon be their best warrior.”
“And the girl?”
“I just told you about the girl.”
“Eat.”
“We have other matters to discuss, Tracker. Enough with nostalgia for now.”
He took the last chunk of flesh in his mouth and chewed. There was blood on the dish. He looked at it, I looked at it, then he looked at me.
“Oh be a fucking beast, Leopard. Your wanting man’s approval troubles me.”
He smiled his huge grin, put the plate to his face, and licked it clean.
